Why choose the Enterprise edition?

Achieve mission-critical scale and performance

Support your most demanding tier 1 workloads with high availability and performance at scale—using 24 TB of addressable memory on 640 logical cores when you run SQL Server on Windows Server 2016.

Create real-time, intelligent applications

Deliver real-time operational intelligence by combining built-in advanced analytics and in-memory technology—without having to move the data or impact performance at scale.

Evolve your data warehousing and big data

Scale to petabytes of data and simplify big data integration with non-relational data sources like Hadoop using PolyBase. Scale up with symmetric multiprocessing and get scale out, massively parallel processing in SQL Server 2016.

Get market-leading security at rest and in motion

Protect data at rest and in motion with features like Transparent Data Encryption and Always Encrypted—all from a database that has the least vulnerabilities of any major platform for seven years running in the NIST vulnerabilities database (National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Vulnerability Database, October 24, 2016).

Uncover business insights

Transform data into actionable insights and drive innovation and business results with the comprehensive business intelligence platform built into SQL Server 2016.

Simplify data management in the cloud

Build hybrid solutions to simplify data management across on-premises and Azure with unlimited virtualization available through software assurance. Get fast, geo-redundant failover using SQL Server disaster recovery with Azure.

View the capabilities of SQL Server 2016 SP1 Enterprise edition

Combine in-memory columnstore and rowstore capabilities in SQL Server 2016 for fast analytical processing right on your transactional data. Open up new scenarios like real-time fraud detection, scale your business with up to 30 times faster transactions, and improve query performance from minutes to seconds.

Protect data at rest and in motion with a database that has the least vulnerabilities of any major platform for seven years running in the NIST vulnerabilities database (National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Vulnerability Database, October 24, 2016). Help secure data for mission-critical workloads with security innovations in SQL Server 2016. Take a multilayered approach by adding Always Encrypted technology along with row level security, dynamic data masking, and robust auditing.

Use the database that consistently leads in TPC-E, TPC-H, and real-world application performance benchmarks. Plus, scale up to 640 logical processors when paired with Windows Server 2016—delivering the ability to have up to 12 TB of addressable memory.

Build comprehensive, analytic solutions with SQL Server Analysis Services. Benefit from the lightning-fast performance of in-memory built into the tabular model and reduce time to insights using direct querying against tabular and multidimensional models.

Get access to data, both big and small, with PolyBase technology that queries Hadoop data using simple Transact-SQL commands. In addition, new JSON support lets you parse and store JSON documents and output relational data into JSON files.

Get a consistent experience from on-premises to the cloud with SQL Server 2016. Build and deploy hybrid solutions for managing your data investments, benefit from the flexibility to run SQL Server workloads in Azure Virtual Machines, and use Azure SQL Database to scale and further simplify database management.